Punching out the Enlightenment: A Discussion of Peter Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft Author(s): Neil Wilson Reviewed

work(s): Source: New German Critique, No. 41, Special Issue on the Critiques of the Enlightenment (Spring - Summer, 1987), pp. 53-70 Published by: New German Critique Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488275 . Accessed: 23/05/2012 01:14
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Out Punching theEnlightenment: A Discussion ofPeter Sloterdtjk's

Kritikder zynischen Vernunft.1
by Neil Wilson
Now, it seems, is the time to take a punch at enlightenment thought. It is difficult to get through an academic day without having to witness somebody jabbing away just to enjoy the pleasure of getting off on the demystification of the functioning of humanist ideals or slapping the En-

lightenment around with the intention of knocking it out of its stupor

and redeeming the hopes of a mastery of nature by reason. Frequently one is faced with the allegations of those who see themselves in a position to deliver a death blow and to replace critical thought with something

else. The Enlightenment, of course, is not without its defenders who suggest that the attack against reason is either an inane jihad led by leftist ayatollahs or an asinine crusade under the direction of born-again reactionaries. Sloterdijk charges into this din of strident accusations and denials, swinging high and low.

were der Kritik zynischen More than 40,000 copies of The Vernunft sold in
the first few months after its appearance in West Germany. It was indisputably a runaway commercial success which transformed a "noone" into a "someone:" The reviews were immediate and animated. It was touted as one of the two cultbooks of the year - the other being Christa Wolf's Kassandra - and the sound of its success startled critics into scurrying around to lay bare the cultural-political reasons for its claim to prominence.2 It is conceivable, once the book is translatedinto English - a translation by the Australian philosopher Michael Eldred for Minnesota University Press is due to be in print soon - that the event will not restrict itself to the continent.

1983).

der 2 am 1. PeterSloterdijk,Kritik zynischen Vernunfl, vols. (Frankfurt Main:Suhrkamp,

2. Karl-HeinzG6tze, "Bombenstimmung: Zu PeterSloterdijks'Kritikderzynischen 142 Vernunft',"DasArgument (1983):821-829.

53

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OnSloterdijk

Sloterdijk's discussion of the Enlightenment does not limit itself to the hundred year span between 1689 and 1789. He tracks it back to its origin in classical antiquity and foward to its expiration in modernism. Through an investigation of the personal and cultural battles over great ideals that have taken place in Western civilization, e.g., the nature of truth, love, authority, life, experience and ego; the courage of heroes; and the art of healing; he traces the debt of enlightenment thought to the satirical impulse and the tragic comedy of its self-denial in the serious cynicism of the will to power and profit. Given its satirical dimension, one would expect to encounter a little, smutty humor. Sloterdijk does not disappoint us. He mixes the dignity of enlightenment thought with the filth, sweat, excretia, copulation, voyeurism and similar embarrassments of its thinkers. The book is a captivating combination of scholarship, slapstick, striptease and disaster, crackling with exciting prose and bristling with memorable aphorisms. It is never dull; unfortunately, it is invariably simplistic. It's a terrific story, well written and entertaining, but it is no critique. Sloterdijk's assault on cynicism is essentially divided into four major parts. It begins with alamentation over the agonies of contemporary phiand losophy. In antiquity knowledge entailed love of truth (Wahrheitsliebe) truth in love (Liebeswahrheit). Knowledge had an erotic dimension. The Enlightenment changed our relation to knowledge so that now it is one of power. Knowledge is power; power is knowledge; and thought has become politicized. There is no longer ecstasy in understanding or a stimulation by ideas. We live in a world in which our relation to "the truth, is one of suspicion and interrogation, in which all thought has become a strategy in aworld continually at war. From the beginning the Enlightenment understood itself as a step toward a better understanding, and a step away from a less adequate one, a step which was based on a voluntary consensus achieved through dialogue. In fact it was more a leap than a step and the feelings associated

with it were ambivalent: pleasure at finding a better way of seeing and pain from giving up an old point of view. As a three-pronged polemic
against authority, tradition and prejudice it was dstined to become a battle with interested parties that had to suffer the change and consequently refused to carry on the dialogue. Nineteenth century critique of ideology is no more and no less than the continuation of this ruptured dialogue by other means. Because the Enlightenment could not give up its claim to provide better insight, it had to operate behind the consciousness of its

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opposition. It became a tactical complex maneuvering behind enemy lines, which employed eight major polemical strategies: revelation was bunk; religion, an illusion; metaphysics, a waste of time; idealism, the mask of self-interest; morality, appearance; the natural, a social construction; self-knowledge, impossible; and the unified self, nonexistent. Where knowledge was power, the intelligentsia seemed to be sure winners. After all, they had researched, designed and produced the weapons of critique. Unfortunately, they ended up using them against themselves. Their only line of defense in our age is cynicism, which is an enlightened false consciousness: an unhappy consciousness in modern form, a schizophrenia that has become reflective, a consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being. The concept articulates a personal uneasiness that can be seen in cultural meaninglessness, false hopes and their disappointment, the advance of irrationality, the paralysis of reason and the deep chasm between what a person knows and what a person does. Cynicism is enlightenment turned sour: a sourness which results from the self-denial that self-survival in a society dominated by instrumental rationality requires. This society presses out the individuals it needs: masochists who keep their depression under control in order to keep working. They sacrifice themselves and force others to make sacrifice. From the sadness of lost innocence the cynic hopes for the pleasure, the accumulation of power and knowledge, toward which all this work is oriented. Where we had been led to expect the total victory of reason we find aworld dominated by pure irrationality (the will to power and knowledge). Anything goes. Everything is equal. Science takes its relativized place in culture, and both rationality and irrationality suffer from a middle-class seriousness. Sloterdijk insists that the only thing left to the Enlightenment is the old Christian tradition of unhappiness. The only possibility left for us is that we can see no way out of the mess. The emphasis on self-survival has led to political realism and the intensification of this realism has led to its exhaustion in the overkill structure which is the main characteristic of the last half of the 20th century. The "bomb" is the last hope and exercise of Western philosophy. It is the Buddha of the West: the objectification of a

will to power that stands behind the desire for self-survival.The bomb is
no more intelligent, evil, destructive, or defensive than we are. We are the bomb!! It marks the termination of the Western subject. Enlightenment philosophy is closely associated with increasing efforts to arm ourselves, both within and without. What Sloterdijk looks for is a philosophy

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rooted in disarmament. He wants us to meditate on the bomb. The first part of the book closes with the claim that only relaxation "Entspannung" can help us. It's time to laugh at the "bomb" and at ourselves. Sloterdijk locates the roots of cynicism in that same ethos that he is sad to see disappear. Already during the classical period of Greek civilization a tension was present in the urge of individuals to remain themselves as living beings in the face of the contortions and half-truths of their society. Being was maintained through opposition, laughter, refusal, and the call to a right to one's complete nature and a full life. Enlightenment began as "kynicism," low culture, inarticulate, spastic and ready to fight; the idea found its way into the philosophical stoas and from there into Christiani-

ty where Christiantheology tried to bury it along with the rest of our pagan inheritance. The concept "cynicism" is reserved for the reply of the dominant culture to the ever-present kynical provocations. Kynicism and cynicism correspond to opposition and repression: more exactly, the embodiment of the self in opposition and the division of the self in repression. In crisis situations they come to blows. They are constants in Western history: typical forms ofapolemical consciousness. From a relatively scholarly analysis of the souring of the Enlightenment, we are treated in part two to a discussion in which "brother pig" is the main topic. Kynicism and cynicism are concepts that are communicated through body language as well as through verbal and written forms. The Enlightenment may have silenced the physical, but it couldn't kill it. Breasts, behinds, feces and genitals are all fields for the expression of the kynical-cynical inspiration, and all fleshy objects for Sloterdijk's mill. In the chapter "Kabinett der Zyniker" we discover that the source of the Enlightenment, the spring of its "Frechheit," its "audacity," is in Diogenes, who was the embodiment of low theory. He led the opposition against Socratic discussion. Kynicism according to Sloterdijk was rooted in man's animalness and used the bodies' gestures as arguments: farting, shitting, and masturbating in public places - pissing against an idealistic wind. Diogenes did not talk against idealism; he lived in opposition to it. Diogenes, "the dog," made fun of his serious colleagues. He was antitheoretical, antidogmatic, antischolastic. With Lucian of

Samosatathe critique changes places. Lucian becomes respected and is co-opted. Criticismbecomes opportunism and is directed toward intellectual simpletons. With Mephistopheles "the dog" turns into an

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antimetaphysical, empirical positivist. Only from the devil can one learn what the case is. Dostoyevsky's GreatInquisitoris the devil in priest's clothing. He is a prototype of the cynical, political, conservatists: Hitler, Goebbels and Stalin. As a realist he has left the dualism of good and evil behind and replaced it with knowledge and power. As a utopian he holds them tightly to his breast. He is cynic and dreamer; one who knows that if he wants to rule over a better world, he needs the truth in order to lie. He

is not interested in men as ends, but as means to find his own place in the
sun. The last character in the cabinet of cynics is Heidegger's "Man." Man exists but there is nothing of substance to him. Man is a construct, The 18th century's will to individudecentered and dissipated (zerstreut). has become the death of the self. Man arms, dissipates, and dies. ality Sloterdijk tells us that in a culture, where one is constantly lied to, one has to know the "fact of the matter" regardless of what morals may dictate; one does not simply want to know the truth; he wants to know the "naked" truth. The third part of the book revolves around the way "truth" is used as an instrument of opposition and repression. In this section Sloterdijk investigates six value spheres; the military, the state, sexuality, medicine, religion, and knowledge, to see how kynical and cynical truths stand against, attack, hit back, relativize and reduce each other to the same empty, trivial, banal, flat level. In addition to these six major sectors where the battle takes place are other terrains where small skirmishes occur: in morals, in the media, in the economic system and in methodological controversies. This section should be read, but in the original rather than in this review. There is simply not space here to do it justice. and the Drittes Part four takes us on a trip through the WeimarRepublik of Dadaism, logophobia, logical positivism, Reichwith their landscapes functionalism, relativism, simplification, unending repetition, reduction and fascism, and provides us with acase study of cynicism in action. In his conclusion, Sloterdijk argues that it is a short road from Diogenes' kynical "cancellation" of philosophy to cynical self-denial. Great philosophy for Sloterdijk embodies the first. And he regrets that, from an archaic teacher of arguments, it has fallen into the twilight of an alienated life where it tends to take life more seriously than the seriousness of life takes it. And why is this philosophy caught up in all this seriousness? Because - if we are to believe Sloterdijk - enlightened subjec-

tivityhas spread its net over the object world and made it a human act of
creation for which we feel responsible.The public misery of modern phi-

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losophy - that so much wants something that "holds good," especially a binding and grounded ethics, and is so often disappointed by its constantly breaking apart - is essentially the misery of an active reason. The Enlightenment was so successful with its active self-making, selfplanning and self-thinking it could not carry the weight of its success. Subjective reason fell into the wheel of subjective interests. A coherent unified subject was cut into pieces and resurrected as universal communication. Social communication dissolved myth and the enlightened found that they must ground themselves on the myth of ideal discourse, la Habermas. Cynical reason, however, has never hesitated to deny t high cultural ideals when it comes to a question of self-survival. There is no suggestion in Sloterdijk's book that cynics can be moved by a communictive rationality; they will always subject communication to their own interests. The author asserts that the great thought of antiquity, in counterdistinction to those of Kant, are rooted in an enthusiastic "let it be" (seinlassen).Sloterdijk wants us to place the priority of the logical relation between doing and "letting be" on the latter. Every action takes place in a matrix of passivity; ordered action depends on the unordered, every change on stability, every calculation on uncalculable spontaneity. We have specialized on subjectivity because we want a totality, even though we don't believe in it. Plainly put, we have subjecdtivized the world because the whole comes to us as confusion; nature, as the source of an inhuman, cruel scarcity; and the social world as a world war. With the destruction of aworld with one world view we destroyed our heredity of passive consciousness, without which practical reason cannot be "real" reason. The bottom line for Sloterdijk is the happiness that is felt when the "possible" is done and when the relation between doing and letting be is obvious.

Sloterdijk'scritiqueof subjectivityas strategyand the critiqueof strategy as cynical reason tries to show that when Kant forbade us to think about an objective purpose or an objective end in nature he gave us a philosophy that was no longer rooted in an overarching world rationality,but one that would bring rationalityto the world. Fromthen on the nature of things was fragmented to obey our ends. Things can be made whole once again only when we disarm ourselves and our society and step away from a serious, tarnished, destructiveactivism. The relationship between rationality,realism and cynicism is so strong that the possibility of thinking of another kind of rationalitythan an irrationality of activism revolves around an experience. that, for lack of a better

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phrase, Sloterdijkcalls the "exuberance of a successful life." In the light of such a spiritualpresence the trackto repetition is broken; it erasesthe
hopelessness of being, and being becomes once again history. When I began reading this book I anticipated that I would find the

source of its success in a disciplined philosophical analysis and an adequate historicalaccount of the rise ofcynicism. Its title and the division of the book into sections which indicate phenomenological (Phiinomenologisches logical (Logisches Hauptstiick) Hauptstiick)and historical treatments of the subject matter suggested that (Historisches Hauptstiick) this was not an unrealisticexpectation. As much as I hate to admit to being fooled, it seems I was led astrayand did not recover my senses until a few hundred pages later. Slowly the deception began to dawn on me. And what dirty little ruse did I discover? There was as little, or as much, History - in the conventional sense of the word - in the historicalsection as there was in the logical and philosophical ones. And as much, or as little, Philosophy - again in the conventional sense of the word - in the philosophical and logical sections as in the historical. Sloterdijk promises History and Philosophy, but rarely gets beyond narration. When he does, his argument is more rhetoricalthen critical.Despite the title of the book there is not much of a critique here. Certainlynot a disci-

plinedone. The book is not a critique- but a parodyon it in whichits without and a gestureof sympathy styleis imitated distorted: misleading content. of impulse Sloterdijk thatthe bookis an investigation the satirical says Whathe does not say,and whatis thatmoves enlightenment thought. It is the moreimportant, thatthestoryhe tellsis itselfasatire. satirizes roof mancethatenlightenment thoughthashadwiththe possibility a betThe terlifebroughtaboutthroughreasoned dialogue. bookis 958 pages in uses nerve.Sloterdijk's of remarkable satirical work,likesatire general, it of morespecifically is anaggressive exercise the akindofmilitant irony, to idealswhichappears be backed moraldegradation enlightenment of
by serious scholastic research. It is no wonder that it has provoked so much abusive praise and denunciation. Satireforces us to take a stand, choose a side and judge. It forces us into that evaluational corner in which so much of human action occurs. The real source of the book's success is in the number of disagreements it produces. The more one reads, in spite of commendable intentions to stay away from the battle, the more one is drawninto the fray- the more one feels, as I did, the necessity to determine where Sloterdijkstands, where he is headed, where

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OnSloterdijk

he ends up and where he wentwrong. The genius in this book is the author's claim that the Enlightenment has features in common with satire. Their common features rest on the similarity of their polemical nature. It gives concrete coloration to this underlying similarity, sets a scene and makes the connection visible. Granted, there is alot of stretch in the comparison, and the simplicity of it all is somewhat disconcerting. However, the metaphors used for enlightenment criticism, indicate that to some extent the Enlightenment understood itself as an act of aggression, and the comparison with satire is instructive. A certain pleasure of understanding follows the surprise of recognizing the stages of enlightenment thought - stages which Sloterdijk implies but never clarifies - as essentially stages Northrop Frye has described, appropriately modified, through which satire can be seen to move.3 First comes low satire - or, if you will, low-beam enlightenment. There is no attempt to displace conventional society and fun is made of the unconventional. Here we find that lovable eccentric Diogenes who has much of the child and malevolent clown about him; gaiety predominate, and one makes fun of the serious unconventionality of the philosphers in the Platonic academy. And we find Lucian who takes for granted a world full of anomalies, injustices, follies and crimes which are permanent and undisplaceable. To keep one's balance in such a world, Lucian stresses the importance of keeping one's eyes open and one's mouth shut and makes fun of the low class rabble that have yet to learn the art of opportunism. Conventional life at its best depends on clairvoyant knowledge of human nature, in oneself and in others, as well as the avoidance of all illusion and compulsive behavior. Lucian ridicules the unconventionality of a low life that relies on ignorance, compulsion and aggressiveness. In the second stage we have the beginning of enlightenment proper, high-beam enlightenment. Order and progress are seen as a product resulting from the mastery of empirical science over nature. Enlightenment thinkers faced with the disenchantment of the world take consolation in the belief that human reason separated from nature can produce objective knowledge about the latter. The sources and values of conventions themselves become objects of derision. In this stage the Enlightenment makes a tactical defense of the pragmatic against medieval dogmatism. Experience is bigger than any set of en3. Northrop Frye,Anatomy Criticism: Essays(Princeton:Princeton University Four of Press, 1957).

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dorsed beliefs; Mephistopheles and the Grand Inquisitor point out the futility of saying what one ought to do or of constructing a coherent scheme to explain life. Medieval pedantry with its attempt to impose oversimplified abstractions, or the beauty of perfect form, or experience becomes the target of thought. In its third stage, parking-lignt enlightenment, one lets go of even ordinary common sense as a standard. Enlightenment begins to question some of our basic everyday assumptions. Customary associations are broken down, sense is reduced to one of many possible categories. Objective knowledge is just another point of view. The social basis of all thinking and the importance of the critique of ideology comes to the forefront. In the next stage, fog-light enlightenment, the logical positivists attempt to resist the infection of reason with the germs of power and interest by clinging to the nostalgic idea that a unified science can guide us through the confusion. Others are more inclined to perceive the violence and lie in the Enlightenment and deny the possibility of even the critique of ideology to produce truth. This latter group succumbs to the fascination of absolute ambiguity. Enlightenment moves around to the ironic aspect of tragedy and satire begins to recede. Adorno and Horkheimer stumble into a muck that sucks harder with every attempt to set up a theory, abandon attempts at systematization in favor of an ad hoc determinate negation and seek a sensibility to the pain that comes with the impossibility of escaping from a totalizing critique. Efforts become muddled, stoicism replaces romantic dignity, and human life is presented in terms of a largely unrelieved bondage. There is the tragedy of emptiness, the discovery of the abyss and an attempt at defiance. Post-humanism marks yet another step; lights out. One is supported by resorting to a theory of power that commits the world to irreconcilable warfare and justifies a surrender to the quest for the pleasurable sensibility necessary for a gay science. Total deviation becomes the rule and comes into play at many levels including that of style. One hopes to produce a new genre of work we might call literary philosophy, or theoretical irony or even historical satire. And here

is where I find Sloterdijkstanding: in front of the discovery of the possibility of the development of a new polemical technique, super-garbling, intended to produce a state of bewilderment in the adversary, that is to say, the reader. The juxtaposition of a spate of different styles simultaneously ["we want to try to reintegrate the truth capacity of literature, satire and art with that of scientific discourse" (p. 59)] conflicts with background

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expectancies the reader has as to how the book should be read; and arouses astonishment, shock, anxiety, embarrassment and anger. This

decentering is partof the author'sproject. He triesvery hard to produce,

what Barthes4 would call, a "writerly" work that invites us to join in and offers us the joys and suffering of co-authorship (and even, at its most intense moments of copulation). He wants to avoid a "readerly" text that virtually reads itself and thus perpetuates an "established" view of the Enlightenment. The book presents us with a collage, or a montage, not a landscape. Zones of indeterminism challenge the reader's capacity to configure what the author seems to take a malign delight in disfiguring. One reaches points - for example the "genius of the genitals" (p. 290) or the "Postkoitale Daemmerung" (p. 901) - and wonders what's up and what's down. Some readers are convinced that if they try harder, go back and examine earlier sections in more detail, theywill find those clues that are necessary to unravel the message. These readers are convinced that the pieces to the puzzle are all there. The more scrambled it appears the more satisfaction they assume they will have when they manage to fit things together. There is no denying the richness of the book for this kind of audience. For others, unaccustomed to Bavarian Baroque with its bloated columns.and ostentatious deceptions, it is going to cause indigestion. They are going to find that the technique is overcooked, the discovery rotten and the theory too raw to stomach. I have no objection if Sloterdijk wants to do philosophy with a little "p" - what Rorty,5 following Sellers, calls "an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term" - rather than Philosophy with a big "P" that points to a more specialized attempt to determine the nature of certain normative notions about Truth, Rationality, Critique and Goodness in the hopes of better obeying them. Nor do I object to his efforts to introduce conversational partners for Philosophers other than scientists - Thomas Mann, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky for example. It does no service to pretend that art, satire, literature and science operate independently of each other, but they do function to mark out areas of intellectual space, and when these spaces are dissolved, they are no longer able to correct and update each other.

4. Roland Barthes,S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1963). 5. Richard Rorty, Consequences ofPragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: UniversityofMinnesota Press, 1982)xiv.

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To juxtapose these different styles in such a way that one does not know where one course begins and another ends, and to suggest that one can prepare all of them equally well is to rely, intentionally or not, on puton. One's reception of the book is probably not so much dependent on the specific way things are arranged or disarranged as the response one takes toward being teased. If s/he complains that Sloterdijk's account is not a plausible description of the Enlightenment the author can say, he was only kidding; don't take the work so seriously ".... it is a labor of entertainment, diversion, amusement: not so much work as it is relaxation" (p. 26.) If s/he doesn't complain s/he suffers through a bad meal, and contracts heartburn. If the victim gets the joke and laughs along with the author, there is a

chance they can both hit it off as snotty satirists.Author and reader can have greatfun once they recognize the superiorityof their ironic insight. From their elevated positions the Enlightenment can be ridiculed and
together they can take delight in the sophisticated puncturing of humanist ideals. They can relate as do the two characters in Richard B. Wright's Man: TheWeekend Our conversation now gathers in upon itself and becomes a full scale put-down of Harold's party. Everythingfrom Hank Bellamy's dirtyjokes to Duncan MacCauley'sgabardinetrousers are raked with a mild pleasing scorn. Near the lighted Christmastree we talkin whispers, like two bored teenagers at a movie. Our remarksare unfairand ungracious and not terrible funny but they bring us together and we are soon hitting it off, feeling comfortablewith one another in isolation.6 If the readers are not "into" put-down there is a chance that they can save themselves by getting "into" emancipation. In this case the Enlightenment is undermined "comically" in the service of ajoyful sense of release from inhibition. Life's invitations to fun are celebrated, including the delights of satire and its capacity to free. This freeing moves imperceptibly into a philosophical manifesto: I have a dream to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom again, to flourish, without disappointment, saturatedwith bi6. Quoted in WayneBooth, A Rhetoric Irony, ofl (Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 1974) 211. My comments here are indebted to some of Booth's descriptions of ironic genres.

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zarre flowers of thought, red, blue and white, in original unfaded colors as in the beginning of Greekphilosophy... the intends to follow - to quote Heinrich Thought of Critique Cynical Heine's characterizationof Aristophanes' comedies - "the profound idea of world extermination" on which a gay science is based and "from which sprouts a fantastic,ironic magic tree with thoughts, treasures, singing nightingales and swingingmonkeys" (pp. 28-29). But on occasion Sloterdijk wants more than to tend his own jungle; he wants to make a revolution. He implies that to overthrow the Enlightenment with words or deeds will be a good thing, but he does not seem to be so sure about how one goes about dealing with the banality of revolu-

tion. What he really promises is a therapy that leads to the "exuberance of a successful life." He treats his readers to rebirth and redemption through relaxation. His satiricstance provides him with all the indifferencehe needs in order to put authoritative distance between himself and his readers. But it does more than that. It allows him to distance himself from the recent past, and it is easy to see the direction in which he is headed. He underscores the death of the Enlightenment by a sentimental and shabby appeal to an all-embracing nostalgia for the mythical womb ofpre-Socratic philosophy, glorifies its values to serve as a contrast to the tyranny of our age and gives us new hopes and desires to feed on. He offers us a quest-romance that will deliver us from the anxieties of the modern. Diogenes in beggar's rags faces off against the cynic in his resplendent scarlet cloak. The enemy is winter, darkness, sterility, moribund life, the dark ages, the wasteland; our hero spring, dawn, vigor, light and fertility. He points us in the direction of a wish-fulfillment dream to emancipate us from cynicism. Our suspicions that the Enlightenment has suffered a reversal of fortune are corroborated and our desires for a return to a state of innocence where our projects are free of vice and wickedness are shared. Sloterdijk promises us a therapy consistent with the exaggerated sense that modernity is at a breaking point and that the next breakthrough will resolve the crises we find ourselves in. Hats off to rhetoric; we need it. Even Socrates used it when he was faced with a mass of listeners he could not convince using methods appropriate to a dialogue. The problem of course is that this in-group solidarity is achieved at the expense of out-group hostility. Those who take a critical attitude toward the taken-for-granted, who insist on some

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conceptual discipline and respect arguments of logical cogency are going

to be offended. They will want to harness the dangerous power that the
art of "saying it well" has over the concern for "getting it right." They will assert that there is nothing in Sloterdijk's argument to distinguish it from flattery, seduction and threat - that is, from the subtlest forms of violence. The Enlightenment may have been a form of discursive aggression; but, unlike Sloterdijk's, it was far from being undisciplined - as Foucault would be quick to point out - and systematically inquired into the faculty of criticism itself and into the relation of criticism to the activity of philosophy. They will complain that Sloterdijk merely parodied the

Enlightenment, leaves it like it is and sets off on an adventure to restore

some very old values, but the attempt is more than our postmodern world can bear. The temptation of restoring the best in our tradition of Western civilization is seductive, but, as Kurt Wolff has remarked, had we abided by the best in our tradition we would have a different one and wouldn't be where we are - which incidently is where tradition has lost its credibility.' If we have not been able to abide to the best of our tradition until now, what evidence do we have that we can do it in the future?

They will maintain, as I will, that what we get from Sloterdijkis an amplification of cynicism more than a restoration of virtue, absolute truth, traditional authority and the essential meaning ofideals.

The distinction between the kynic and the cynic is the act that permits Sloterdijk'sbook to come into being in the firstplace. It is ahistoricaland undialectical; in that it is based on a pure opposition, a set of absolute
contraries, a binary line-up of adversaries. Two farcical characters, Aristophanic style, are tossed into the pits where they are prodded into bellowing, roaring and ranting. They shout themselves hoarse, flail their arms and accomplish nothing at all. Just when they seem exhausted Sloterdijk gives them a new excuse to going at each other's throat. Yet once we move in closer, matters are quite different. The work is a demonstration of these opposites as is self-cancelling Sloterdijk's relation to his subject matter. The author locates himself in the Kynic's corner to fight off his own cynicism. He relieves his frustrations with activism, and reveals his hopes for surrender in his antipathy to cynicism, but he ends up in the same cynical place where he began. The work is parasitic upon the very strategies and tactics the author appears to be trying to defeat. On
7. KurtWolff,"Surrender-and-Catch and Criticism Hermeneutics," Philosophy Social 1 (1984):1-16.

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first glance the book appears to be a criticism of cynicism; on a second look, rather than putting the Enlightenment in abeyance, it seems to retain its most salient and questionable features. Sloterdijk wants to be different but the more he struggles the tighter the bond of dependence and the more he shows himself to be cynical, aggressive, destructive, serious, indifferent, elitist, subjectivist and masochistic. While he complains, as Charles Newman does,8 that our age is marked by the alternation of a kind of self-deprecation and defensive arrogance which results from the inflation of a process ofa demystification that is everybody's prerogative, he pulls off the casual subversion of the continuation of the enlightenment dialogue with the support of authoritative indifference - and from behind the mask of a false scholarship. The debate between the kynic Sloterdijk wants to be and the cynic he is, is a debate between a cherished and a hated self, a classic illustration of the schizophrenic activity that he finds so objectionable. For the kynic in him, virtue is the only good, disarmament an honorable motive and the exuberance of a successful life a worthwhile goal. The cynic in him questions the value of virtues, motives and a successful life. "I promise to promise nothing, especially not new values" (p.29). Two pictures flash across the screen of the reader's imagination: a sparkling-eyed kynic and an evil-eyed cynic, crooked-mouthed, sarcastic, sneering. If his goal is to polarize his readers as he has polarized himself, he has polished up a craft which should be praised for its efficiency. If his goal is to escape from the clutches of a polemical consciousness, he went wrong in his choice of a tool; ironicsatire does not and cannot serve that purpose. Its use insures that he will end up standing in the same argumentative trenches where he started: on the frontlines pointing his weapons at an abstraction. A totalitarian world characterized by the complete subjection of every action, emotion, thought or decision to an instrumental rationality simply does not exist. The uncomfortable position in which Sloterdijk finds himself is to some degree a result of the stance he has taken in regard to history. There is the shopworn insistence that the Enlightenment must have become cynicism, the result, I assume, of some infernal, internal, immutable logic. Everything is in the service of the demise of the Enlightenment. Where is the unordered and uncalculable that Sloterdijk so much wants to emphasize? His objective, in spite of his denials, appears
8. Charles Newman, ThePost-Modern Aura: TheAct ofFictionin an Age ofl Inflation (Evans-

ton: Northwest UniversityPress, 1985).

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to be the reconstitution of an orderly past that has direction and design. It is dependent on those great, nihilistic topoi of the 19th century. Themes like the death of God, the end of morality and the meaninglessness of life. etc., are today generally received with a shrug of the shoulders. The twilight of the Enlightenment, it appears to me, is not so much characterized by hopelessness, unhappiness, confusion and resig-

nation as itis by sarcasm,irony and humor.

I am not insisting that Sloterdijk should restrict himself to a narrow rational or historical reconstruction. There is, as Rorty9 argues, alegitimate stories - most recently repregenre of big sweeping geistesgeschichtlich sented by Foucault, Blumenberg and MacIntyre. It works at the level of problematics rather than of solutions to problems. The purpose of assembling a cast of characters and constructing a dramatic narrative to show how we have come to ask questions we are now convinced are inescapable and profound is to justify the author's and his friends' view toward present practices. Sloterdijk may be right in claiming that we are on the wrong track in regard to our philosophical questions and that we should adapt his problematic, but his lack of control over his evidence results in an abstract, free-wheeling and unconvincing kind of intellectual history. He ignores the possibility that other or more sources of evidence would change his narrative, modify his generalizations and undermine his conclusion. He does not imagine a historical situation in which enlightenment thought would be absent and other factors could have played the hypothetical role - the bureaucratization of the state, the organization of communication, record keeping, disciplinary power, or technological innovation, for example. With the absence of enlightenment thought would modern cynicism still have occurred - assuming, of course, that it has? Readers looking for a relation of adequate causality in regard to the enlightenment ethic and the spirit of cynicism will not be convinced that the configuration of enlightenment thought and cynicism is a conjunction that Sloterdijk has substantiated. The Yanomamo are far from being enlightened but close to the cynicism that Sloterdijk insists is a trait of the late modern. The disappointment here is not the absence of any regularity of a nomological type but the failure of the author to suggest, or at least try to come to terms with hypothetical cases. These hypothetical constructions are an integral part of an historical account.
9. RichardRorty,J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner,ed., Philosophy History: in Essaysonthe (London: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984)56-61. ofphilosophy historiography

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On Sloterdijk

As Ricoeur'o has remarked, they restore to the past the uncertainty of the future and offer a means of escaping a retrospective illusion of totality. An illusion Sloterdijk's book fosters on its readers. Sloterdijk's commitment to satire requires him to produce an object of attack by giving it a unity and palpable reality. He needs a totalitarianism to reject. From Enlightenment thought which was a vortex of conflicting approaches and proposals Sloterdijk abstracts those notions that fit into his design. Where is the sense of historical contingency, the sense that Enlightenment has meant many quite different things. He flattens our perspective and shrinks our imaginative range, presenting us with a minimalist view of modernity: knowledge is power; being virtuous is seeming virtuous; essence is appearance; discovery is justification; peace is war; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. The differentiation of value spheres that seems characteristic of modernization is reduced to one dimension: the polemical. Ignored are the possibilities that bourgeois ideals still serve to justify our actions, scientific knowledge is not always manipulative, justified systems of law and morality exist, aesthetic

experiences are still productive, totalitarianismis an abstraction,a real part of history is painful, and a part of knowledge has, in fact, required struggle.There is an outrightdismissal of the tracesand existing forms of communicative rationality as false, incomprehensible, inappropriate, corrupt, inadequate and unauthentic. There is a quarrelwith critica itself; Sloterdijkis looking for the disenchantment of scientificconvention and the reenchantment of myth. He sees a way to surpass realism and cynicism in Nietzsche's insight thatyou cannot combat a powerful myth with the weapons of science, reason or common sense; you can only combat it with a more powerful myth. Sloterdijk'ssatire on the Enlightenment's romance with rationaldiscourse revealsits own romantic side in its quest for a mythicalreturn. The critique of cynicism, as Habermas" has said about Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic holds out the hope of a returnto ofEnlightenment, innocence. It simply requires a final unmasking. Pull back the veil concealing the absolute truth;uncover the naked factwhich is the confusion of knowledge and power. Sloterdijkwantsto separatethem, as well as the other dichotomies which he feels have collapsed under the weight of
and 10. PaulRicoeur,Time Narrative (Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 1984). 11. Jiirgen Habermas, "The Entwinement.of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Read26 ing Dialecticof Enlightenment,"NewGerman Critique (1984):13-31.

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modernization, with one blow.His romantic extremism drags up the old excessive antithesis so he can reject either one or the other. He conjures up the bogeyman of binary oppositions who, many of us thought, had been pretty well leveled offby Wittgenstein. His approach reveals a purist belief in the idea that evil resides in the internal relationships between categories and that this filth must be removed so that philosophy cleansed of all the political, moral, ontological and methodological mud of the swampy ground of modernity can operate on the high ground of Ionian thought. Hence, he closes the debate over the relation between knowledge and power, enlightenment and cynicism. He refuses the authority of the possibility of continuing their discussion and submits to that to which he so much objects: the authority of an absolute naked truth that prevents further inquiry. But one wonders if it really is a simple matter to decipher the relations between these various categories. Isn't one faced with the difficulty of collecting evidence that could produce a plausible case? Wouldn't that evidence require a conceptualization and systemization that goes far beyond that required for satire? Would it not also require an excruciating step-by-step methodology? Aren't the categories so interwoven that they can only be separated through the mediation of thought and action? At the beginning of our investigations do we know what stems from philosophical or theological sedimentation, from interpretation, normative constraints, cynicism and so on? Do we know what relations between the categories are relevant to humanity's survival or in need of testing, as Kurt Wolff has put it," 'surrender to' - in order to find out whether they are relevant or in what sense they are?"'2 Why is it necessary to find a natural starting point that is independent of our enlightenment traditions? If a starting point is necessary, why not the stone-ages rather than the arand Horkheimer not show that archaic myth chaic period? Did Adomrno is already Enlightenment and the Enlightenment out of fear has remained myth? Why do we need to find the world's own rationality to replace the reasonings of our time and place? Why should abetter world be a consequence of"finding" rather than "making" - a consequence of philosophical rather than poetic achievements? Why continue the attempt to clean up our game? Why not think the Enlightenment through once again in terms ofwhat has been jettisoned in the name ofa spurious purity? Why not make a garden out of all that dirt? Why not pay attention
12. Wolff6.

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OnSloterdijk

to those areas of experience remystified by the Enlightenment's and Sloterdijk's incessant concern with disinfectants? Sloterdijk, to his credit, shows us that enlightened demystification does not finally alleviate either practical, theoretical or aesthetic difficuties, but seems only to deepen and further conceal them. But far from coming to terms with the problem - by ignoring it for example - he becomes part of it with his debunking of enlightenment. Sloterdijk bears a lot; he is a good barker, but a poor teacher, who puts his faith in easy, quick answers that come before and rule out the question. The question is how, on historicist and antifoundational grounds, to justify a form of inquiry that no longer pretends to any form of totalizing, not even Sloterdijk's totalized cynicism. Unfortunately, Sloterdijk, by means of the frustration engendered by his ironic mistrust ofcritica, ends up producing the indeterminism, relativity and confusion of the late modern that he tries to leave behind by dint of not imitating it. He has become lost in the objectified products of our age and feels forced to fight his way out. But is the fight necessary or is he simply swinging away at the wet sack of a masochist's imagination? In the end his solution is to throw in the towel. However, was there a challenger to begin with or was he only shadow boxing, tilting at windmills and confusing surrender and attack? Surrender, peace and disarmament demand mediation; and what mediation is required is not the easy playing off of a comic strip image of a free-spirited kynic against a puritanical cynic, but a relationship based on something more than revenge in the intellectual arena. It may require that we abandon, as Fred Dallmayr'3 suggests, an argumentative approach whose goal is to vindicate a given outlook and take up a more flexible stance that shows a generous respect for differences.

13. Fred Dallmayr, Language Politics(South Bend: University of Notre Dame and Press, 1984).